Viewpoint
Nigeria is one of Africa’s largest and fastest growing economies, which has created many opportunities for business savvy entrepreneurs and companies. Unfortunately this has also attracted the attention of unscrupulous medicine suppliers who are flooding the pharmaceutical supply chain with enormous quantities of counterfeit and substandard medicines.
Most surveys indicate that counterfeit, expired, and substandard medicines are particularly prevalent in open-air markets in Nigerian cities. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) over half a million deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia each year as a result of fake anti-malaria medicines.
Courtesy of Fight the Fakes
Many anti-malaria medicines in Nigeria are sourced from Asia, a region that is rife with counterfeit pharmaceuticals. The draw for sourcing medicines from Asia is affordability; they are typically much less expensive than the medicines produced by European and North American pharmaceutical companies. However, the net result, up to 1 out of 3 anti-malaria medicines sold in Africa are fake.
Poor quality medicines exert a negative impact on public health and often injure the most vulnerable members of society. The Nigerian public is becoming increasingly insecure about medicine quality due to the widespread and increasingly accurate perception that fake medicines are often responsible for medical injury and unnecessary death.
The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) is the Nigerian government body responsible for ensuring the security of domestic and imported foods and medicines. Their core mission is to combat counterfeit and substandard medicines using various techniques including modern technologies such as the Mobile Authentication System (MAS) and portable spectroscopy. MAS technology, a point-of-sale and point-of-use mobile authentication system, allows hospitals, pharmacies, and Nigerians to use mobile devices to interrogate the scratch code found on medication packages and thereby authenticate medicine. Portable spectroscopy, mainly used by Nigerian customs agents, uses the distinctive electronic signature or bio-molecular fingerprint of the active drug compounds to positively identify the presence of the necessary Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) of the medicine. Nigeria has made great progress in drug safety using technology -- however, technology-as-a-solution has its limitations, and by itself cannot secure Nigeria’s pharmaceutical supply chain.
It is important to employ comprehensive solutions that address the safety gaps within the pharmaceutical supply chain, to achieve long-term improvement in drug safety. Because of the scale of the problem, the current approach to drug safety in Nigeria has fallen short. In large part, current drug safety monitoring such MAS relies heavily on end-users (doctors, pharmacies, and patients) for monitoring drug safety. This approach is inefficient, expensive, and focuses mainly on the downstream issues of the pharmaceutical supply chain where the spread of counterfeit medicines is difficult to manage.
Notwithstanding, Nigeria can improve drug safety by taking a proactive, multifaceted, and preventative approach.
Proactive
To secure pharmaceutical supply chain, it is important to stay up-to-date on global drug safety issues, developments, and leverage historical trends. This will better equip drug safety administrators with information about medicines that maybe susceptible to counterfeiting, so that they can take counter measures to manage pharmaceutical supply risks.
Multifaceted
Various tools and methods must be leveraged in unison to achieve drug safety. The concerted use of technology, information, process, strategy, and regulations, will ensure drug safety gaps are addressed from multiple fronts.
Preventative
“Prevention is better than cure”, this saying rings true for pharmaceutical supply chain security. Achieving drug safety will require bench-marking industry best practices, staying informed about drug safety issues, investigating potential sources of counterfeit and substandard medicines, and implementing corrective measures throughout the pharmaceutical value-chain.
Drug safety in Nigeria will require a comprehensive plan that anticipates, safeguards against, and eliminates counterfeit and substandard medicines from the entire pharmaceutical supply chain.